FriendOfDeSoto

@FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a font/typeface designing program that is available for Windows or Linux that supports creation of variable fonts and OpenType features?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe 10 years ago I tried designing a font in Inkscape. It was possible but more of a gimmick. I then installed Fontforge and very quickly decided I wasn’t going to learn how to use it, didn’t have the bandwidth. But the tools are there. Both methods have a learning curve but I think have enough instruction resources online.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Star Wars is an ode to the stupidest use of battle lasers⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Are you beginning to feel a narrowing of your throat?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In languages which use complex written characters (such as Chinese's logographs), is there an equivalent to English's "text speak" shorthand?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s difficult 2 transpose what u can do in English just 2 other languages written in the Latin alphabet for centuries. English has a remarkable and quite confusing amount of homophones that is absent from other indoeuropean languages. The apostrophe as a letter skipped marker is fairly universal. But beyond that it’s already a different ball game in other more similar languages. 2 to too, 4 for, r u - that’s very English only.

  Simplified Chinese characters are a hint at what they did on the Chinese mainland to cut down on writing time. Beyond that (and I don’t speak the language so 🧂) there are single character abbreviations for countries. 美国 is America and 美 suffices as shorthand, which means beauty otherwise. Your example phrase is “R u coming 2nite?” In English we use the present progressive tense here, which doesn’t exist like that in Mandarin. It would be phrased as “Come tonight?” The question mark could be replaced with the character that functions as a question marker by itself. And I think you can do this in 3-4 characters and I think they might just beat you to it in a bilingual texting competition in terms of speed.

  The mainland population may also be more adept to obfuscate their speech especially online. So similarly pronounced character combinations take over the meaning of a term the censors are actively looking for.

  The Japanese like shortening stuff, mostly loanwords, to unrecognizable words. The word for part time work is アルバイト (arubaito) taken from the German for work (Arbeit). Cool kids have whittled it down to baito. A remote control has become a リモコン (rimokon) in normal parlance. Overly long Chinese character combos like 自動販売機 for a vending machine get shortened to 自販機 dropping characters that can be inferred (if you speak it).

  I also want to add that text speak is heavily influenced by restrictions on text length and charges for each text. Non Latin script characters take up more than one Latin character per Chinese character for instance. It’s probably 5+ in decoding per character. So you reach 160 letters quite quickly and that’s why SMS in China was very cheap and quickly adopted a system where message threads would be sent and put back together on the recipient’s phone. In Japan they used email from the start, even in dumb phone T9 texting days. They had no Twitter-like restrictions on text length so they didn’t need to be shorter than what their thumbs could successfully fumble together.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Q anon was a psyop.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Let’s not call it psy op then. We need a new term. BS op maybe?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I think better when I'm calm. So it follows that getting calmer will make me smarter.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you’re looking at correlation more than causation. That’s what the enlarged gas tank metaphor in another comment here is trying to hint at.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I think better when I'm calm. So it follows that getting calmer will make me smarter.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t mind your fiddling with that razor at all. I see what you mean.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I think better when I'm calm. So it follows that getting calmer will make me smarter.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Your intelligence isn’t improved by calmness. Calmness may simply be the state when it is the most unimpeded.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Found a 2009 YouTube video about a green, healthy looking fir tree growing inside a man's lung. CNN video shows a surgeon and the patient being interviewed.. was it a hoax?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think what you’re not picking up on is the whole Ms. Moos vibe on CNN. She is basically satire. She always jumps on the most outrageous stories and narrates them in that annoying pseudo journalistic voice and has done for decades. The stories may be actually true but you should never assume that they are. They are a knock knock joke for people who watch 24h news channels.

  I don’t know anything about this case more than having watched the CNN video. Mr. Fir-lung and his doctor needn’t be actors. He could’ve really had it in his lung but played up the “haha, maybe I breathed in a seed” line because it got him attention on TV and paid interviews. And he doesn’t mention how he was in a landslide being chased by a bear 5 years ago and that’s when he accidentally inhaled the debris. The doctor may just have mentioned in a subordinate clause that it looked as if the sprig was growing in the lung but never actually claimed it did. Or he also believes in homeopathy. Or he also got paid for the interview. There are a thousand explanations why we get presented the story like that. But the biggest red flag remains that Jeanne Moos was reporting on it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Q anon was a psyop.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Psy op implies an amount of planning and the involvement of the military or the intelligence community. I think it is better attributed to chance that the cryptic pretentious musings of one person snowballed into a cultish internet movement. Because it garnered strength online, the musing person at the heart of it probably changed due to tiny power struggles.

  People like to know there is a plan for everything. People always suspect a secret cabal behind everything. People are also dumb and impressionable. It doesn’t take a general or CIA buffin to try to target the Venn diagram of those three groups. I think it had the results you describe, it contributed to what we see in the US today: a weakening of the rule of law and a slide into fascism.

  Calling QAnon psy op is giving what basically started as a 4chan meme too much credit. If no one took a gun to find a nonexistent basement in a DC pizza restaurant, society at large may have never discovered this snowballed cult, and jumped on it like a cat does catnip, enlarging its reach. The secret “cabal” behind it is maybe a handful of people. Bored and slightly Machiavellian internet users with odd political views and/or the love of endorphin-inducing likes and reach. Never attribute to conspiracy what you can more likely attribute to stupidity. QAnon is stupid. Stupidity with disastrous cobsequences. But not a planned psy op campaign.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Are you getting inundated with JFK was anti Israel posits and hot takes? Because I sure aren’t.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why doesn't the US government just tax illegal immigrants a little bit more than the Average american? Then use those funds to fix infastructure or a new WPA of the 21st century?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If illegal immigrants were possible to be identified easily by the IRS, ICE would have taken them over already.

  The problem is two-fold. A lot of the immigrants who fall into this “illegal” category are not on the books, they get a brown envelope, and pay little to no taxes at all. And the more “sophisticated” ones look just like your average American. So if you taxed them more, you’d be affecting a lot of the “legal” population as well.

  Also, the American economy is full of jobs that no “non-deportable” would like to do. Agricultural jobs come to mind. The current regime’s idea of eradicating all illegal immigrants runs contrary to a lot of economic interests (and I read that they’ve done a lot less deporting on the farms recently. Curious …) Even if you could just tax them more, you’d still mess with those interests as well.

  And while I’m not a tax lawyer, I’m gonna go out in a limb here and say it’s not going to be easy to make a tax law like that that isn’t going to be heavily scrutinized in the courts because it is unabashedly discriminatory.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a term for something like Imposter Syndrome, but instead feeling like it’s other people conspiring to give you an illusory taste of success with intent to pull it away and screw you over?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Gaslighting

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Conspiracy theorist always claim pyramid are build by aliens or giants, but then it could be just Sphinx covering their poop.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sphinxy is mad then. Or poops prodigiously. Sphinxy is much, much smaller than any of the surrounding pointy poop parlors.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s not an argument, that’s somebody who only looked at the cover of the cliff notes on presidential terms but didn’t read it. Consecutivity isn’t required. Neither president should get elected a third time without a change or suspension of the constitution. With the rule of law under 47 weakening it is not impossible but I’m still optimistic.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do animals in the Peppa Pig universe work?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So you’re trying to apply logic to an animated kids show. My advice is: stop. It doesn’t matter. Cookie monster never eats a cookie either.

  I like to imagine that all creators of kids shows were high as a kite when they came up with the premise. [Takes a massive hit] “Duuuude, they’re like a team of first responder dogs but they can fly helicopters and one is a cop. They’re like the Village People but dogs.” [Takes another hit] “And they can talk!” And thus Paw Patrol was born.

  [Lights up spliff] “Oy, mate. 'ere’s the thing. She’s a cheeky one, this Peppa. And she’s a pig. 'Er 'ead’s always sideways. She’s always mucking about.” [Inhales deeply] “And all the other muppets are animals too. But get this: there are other animals.” [Exhales] “But they can’t talk.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the canonical version of STVI?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Who thought it is a good idea to let George Lucas edit Trek? It’s like an Odo shot first kind of situation. And I think Odo never used a phaser.

  Is this is the guy that Scotty shoots in the end? If so, I’ve only ever seen the version with that scene and the bad Mission: Impossible face mask reveal. And I owned this movie as a VHS bought in Europe as part of a set released before VII came out…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the canonical version of STVI?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  II, IV, and VI are all worth a watch. They are a good movie, an entertaining movie, and a surprisingly good movie respectively.

  I’ll watch the odd numbered ones as well but I’m a fan and I know I is too long, III is mostly not good, and I enjoy V for its craziness.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If government hackers can infiltrate big companies, why not hack normal people?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the Sony hack is not a great example because there is a very good chance it was more politically motivated than financially. It’s one of those cases where we might never know but there is a good chance it was orchestrated by North Korea in response to a Sony movie that made Kim III not look very divine. NK is most likely connected to other hacks as well that were really just a way to get hard currency/to evade sanctions.

  Effort and reward are like supply and demand. If I want to steal your credit card number to go shopping, it might take me a long time to get to it. And then it turns out there is only $500 left on it. Too much effort for not enough reward. That’s why phishing, Nigerian princes, texted IRS/DMV fines, missed FedEx deliveries, and all that jazz happens. Low effort to throw a net out and then catch the dumbest of the fish. If you are a person of interest to me though the math if different. Maybe I’m a stalker (look behind you, I’m there right now). Or maybe horny me is looking for your (perfectly legal) sexting thread. Or you’re a pedo, a socialist, a cult leader, or all of the above. Private people get hacked. But it rarely makes a splash in the news like the Sony hack.

  Also, hacker ≠ hacker. There are good guys who hack stuff to show what needs fixing or to hold people to account. There are bad guys who do it for money or because they like it. There are those with one foot on either side of that fence. Motivations differ wildly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is this clock icon in my phone status bar?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Do you let your network set the time or did you do it manually? Could be a hint that you’re off by a minute or so (considering you’ve checked all the other reasonable things already).

  Any other apps installed that may want to set alarms? Maybe a sideload? Calendar app you’ve tried and not uninstalled?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kids don't understand some times you just watch southpark to find out how kenny dies.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They killed Kenny?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you want you get a good idea about the complexity, there is a sci-fi novel called “Three Body Problem” by Liu Cixin. It lays out a situation with 3 suns and it’s very messy (not a spoiler).

  The details are important. How big are the suns, how do they revolve around each other? I’m not going to pretend to be able to do the math if I had the details. But it throws into question if life on earth would have developed at all. And it it did it would be very different. Our planet has won the lottery. It got an atmosphere, is far enough from the sun but not too far away to benefit from its energy. A stable orbit gives us four seasons. A lot of life on this planet has developed around that and around one moon giving us predictable tides. All of that would be messed up, a livable earth would probably need to be further out from the bi-suns. The slow process of evolution likes relative stability. Two suns pulling on everything would provide the opposite. That’s why I would lean towards no life actually. Greater mass at the center of the bisolar system would also raise the odds of getting hit by a rock. The moons might be slamming into each other and then the planet.

  What I’m saying is it’s not a good idea…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I see from my own behavior that more and more stuff is done on my cell phone and less stuff on a PC. I think eventually everything will be merged into a single device. But I wouldn’t bet on the form factor yet. Whether it will be AR/VR headsets or a form of tablet or a tech yet to amaze us - IDK.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I get scared of a girl who approached me⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think you did anything wrong. I hate people striking up a conversation like that as well.

  You can train yourself not to panic, deep breaths, focusing on something in the middle distance, closing your eyes, counting to ten - whatever works for you. And then you can ride a situation like this out. Either by masking your discomfort or giving very curt replies. You can also just say “I’m very sorry, I’m not in the mood for a chat.” But you mustn’t worry that you made an extrovert sad. She’ll get over it and maybe learn from this experience as well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI can kill information⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I take your point. It’s just that any scenario you’re describing with so-called AI could have been done by a search engine already. The slop of yesteryear was SEO ranking articles and fake links to make the algorithm prioritize your site over others. Well poisoning is how PR agencies get troublesome celebs out of the headlines again. The list goes on.

  I share your concerns about the black boxed nature of so-called AI and by extension their search engines. I’m not saying it isn’t a problem; it’s just not a new one. Up until now we have had companies in charge with a vested interest not to bend the flow of information too far from, let’s call it, the median truth. Now companies are letting models make these decisions and some humans afford these models more credibility than their common sense and that is all worrying to say the least. So I’m a worried as you are, it just started earlier for me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI can kill information⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  All of these things would have been possible to restrict on good old Google searches. And they are enforced to varying degrees around the world to differing legal situations. You shouldn’t be able to search for child porn anywhere, swastika merch in Austria, insults of the king in Thailand, etc.

  Search on Google mainly got worse because of Google. They made their results more shit to get you to click on follow ups, the dreaded page 2 of results for instance, where they could sell more ads.

  I do agree that so-called AI search is more of a black box. Although the Googles and the Bings want you logged in to personalize the results, you can find a way to test their otherwise mostly obscured algorithms in a neutral setting. The models may not allow that and/or testing their metal may have yet to be invented. But they will replace search as we knew it.

  The growing faith people have in whatever LLMs spit out (over old school searches) is very concerning. It’s like LLMs are the new Facebook conspiracies. Schools need to teach media literacy as its own subject. All people under 70 today should have to get a media drivers license.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I fear this has the potential of becoming the copied standard unfortunately. Fear of terrorism is like think of the children. All it will do is force people who need visas into having squeaky clean innocuous public profiles and operating anonymous accounts with actual opinions. Terrorists will do the same. So this privacy infringement will only catch really dumb people.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is flirting redundant?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No, it isn’t. They may already like you but how will they know you care if you don’t offer an array of easy to misunderstand signals?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Marijuana Prevention Matters—Especially for Teens and Young Adults⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In no situation where weed is legal minors are allowed to buy it. I would be onboard on this propaganda train if all I saw on Netflix is 15yo’s getting high. Which I don’t see that much really.

  Minors should not consume it. Minors have parents. Minors’ parents’ job it is to keep them away from that along with sniffing glue, tobacco, vaping, alcohol and eating laundry capsules, just to name a few dangers more.

  The negative effects on brain development I read about were all linked to regular, if not heavy use. There is enough wiggle room for school/education and, once again, the parents to step in.

  Idiocracy is happening anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is the progress pride flag so poorly designed (especially the intersex progress pride flag)? Will it be redesigned?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You are judging work by somebody who doesn’t feel compelled to follow guidelines made by other people with those very same guidelines. Those other people looked much more closely at flags for geographical entities, not movements, to come up with their guidelines. No one is required to follow them or retroactively abide by them. They are a great style guide but not the law.

  Every flag serves a purpose. This flag’s purpose is to show representation by color and design for everyone in the community. It’s was the point to be busy.

  Why don’t they just stick with the rainbow flag? Because the idea of the rainbow encompassing everyone was made at a time when gay and lesbians came out with pride but many of the letters that abbreviate that community today were still marginalized more harshly, maybe even within homosexual circles. They weren’t all suddenly anthropists and free from discriminatory points of view. Development of ideas and communities takes time. And that’s why an artist took ideas from many different flags that were created over time and combined them into one. It is eye catchy and instantly recognizable, even at a medium distance still.

  I don’t find the result aesthetically pleasing either. But I recognize a) that wasn’t the point of it and b) I’m not a member of the LGBTQ+ community. If from within that community a movement rises to change the flag into something else, by all means. Other than that my design opinions - and I suspect many other ones in this thread - are largely academic and frankly irrelevant.

  Good flag bad flag is not the gospel. Take it as a starting point for new designs but don’t scrutinize all existing flags by it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Vibe coding is to coding what microwaving is to cooking.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s unfair to microwave ovens because they have established uses, even in some fine dining establishments. So-called AI has none of that just yet.